Joan Dye Gussow

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What Happened To Our Food Supply?

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The revered pioneer of the local food movement, author, professor, food policy expert, and gardener Joan Dye Gussow, discusses here what has happened to our food supply in her lifetime -- going from 800 products in the supermarket in the 1940's to over 40,000 products today. Most of them processed, fake, disease forming and ultimately deadly.

She was instrumental at the dawn of what would become the environmental and food movements.

"She foreshadowed by several decades the current interest in relocalizing the food supply," says her biography on Wikipedia, and food politics and nutrition authors such as Michael Pollan and others say there would be no field at all if it weren't for Gussow, who in the 1970s wrote the landmark book: "The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology," based on her concerns about the oil crisis and food transport.

Now in her 80s, her latest book Growing, Older: A Garden Based Collection of Reflections on Death, Life, and Vegetables, was published in 2010 by Chelsea Green Publishing.

Gussow thinks she has lived long enough the see parts of her dream come true.

"I do not know how to explain all the young people who are interested in farming," she says. "That's the touching part to me, that there is a whole group of young people who are wanting to use their hands."

--Celia Farber

This video is produced by Hudson River HealthCare who honored Joan Gussow, with the 2010 Cornucopia Award.

Celia Farber is an investigative science reporter and cultural journalist who has written for several magazines including Harper’s, Esquire, Rolling Stone, SPIN and more. She is the author of “Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS” (Melville House Press/ Random House). Known for bold exposes of the pharmaceutical industry and related media cover ups, Celia Farber shines a spotlight on the very subjects that have been taboo for too long: What is Cancer? Does HIV cause AIDS? Do Vaccinations Cause Brain Damage? And many more...